Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

121 Rare and Unforgettable Concerts
and a viola wi√ violinn / piece for when comes Mr. Surly [Tibor Serly].’’
He softened the rebuke with ‘‘Buon anno / an’ yes’m, he wants her back.’’
Olga was still at Hook Heath with the Richardses in January 1935,
‘‘twenty minutes from the nearest village shop (where nothing to be had),
two-and-a-half miles from Woking. It costs 5 shillings to go to London,
and [I am] chased with [the] hurry of missing the train back and keeping
dinner waiting,’’ she wrote Ezra. Some ten thousand desertions were
reported in the Tyrol: ‘‘expect mostly lies, still she wishes He would write
Leoncina and tactfully ascertain whether all quiet there, if not could just
keep her at Sant’Ambrogio, or put her to the Ursulines [nuns’ school].’’
Pound, who was then using Rome Radio as a platform to expound his
economic theories, was highly critical of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
New Deal. ‘‘Wot’s Frankie going to say tomorrow?’’ he wondered,
referring to the President’s popular ‘‘fireside chats,’’ then enjoying a wide
audience in the United States. He quoted Alice Roosevelt (of the rival
Oyster Bay branch of the family, as opposed to FDR’s, of Hyde Park),
who ‘‘sez he iz ‘nine parts Eleanor & one part mush.’ ’’ Olga, who listened
to the President’s address distorted by short wave, adopted Ezra’s views:
‘‘His voice sounded awful . . . like the voice of a dead man hypnotized to
speak.’’
On April 6, 1935, a week before her fortieth birthday, Olga received sad
news from her stepmother, Katherine: ‘‘Your dear father has left us. . . .
The end was sudden, though his strength was declining since the first of
the year. . . . Father Sammon brought him Holy Communion and anointed
him, and immediately after, he began to sink away.’’ The funeral was held
at St. Columba’s Church, with burial in the family plot in Grove 10 of
Calvary Cemetery. ‘‘He had wanted so much to see you and Teddy again,
and always talked of going to see your little house in Venice. You were
very dear to your father’s heart, Olga, and his lifelong separation from his
children was a cross hard to bear.’’ Of her many regrets, the one that
bothered Olga most was that Edgar Rudge died without knowing he had a
granddaughter.
After her father’s death, Olga again turned to her mother’s old friend,